"Because there's an obvious demand for a binary distro based on Gentoo."

Umm... But Gentoo isn't a binary distro. To take full advantage of Gentoo's features, the derived distro would _absolutely_ have to be source-based. How can you have the awesomeness that is conditional compilation in a binary distro? I mean, think about this -- the package in question has about 50 use flags, which means, that there are (2 to the power of 50) ways to compile it, right? A binary package maintainer for such distro would have to maintain an insane amount of package variations -- like a quadrillion or so.

My point is: what exactly do you mean by "Gentoo-based binary distro"? Optimizations? Gentoo isn't about CFLAGS, really. USE flags? Fine, but how can one implement every possible USE flag configuration for a given package?

You're missing the point. In a binary distribution based on Gentoo, the packages would be prebuilt with a default make.conf. The user would have the option of building from source with custom CFLAGS/USE if they wish, but most users would be fine with the binary package most of the time.

It would be just like regular Gentoo, except you have the option (possibly the default) to install binary packages built with fairly conservative CFLAGS and fairly inclusive USE flags.

If you're familiar with Arch Linux, imagine more of that kind of binary/source hybrid packaging concept but based on Gentoo's ebuild tree, Portage/Paludis package management, and the rest of the Gentoo platform.

If you're familiar with Arch Linux, imagine more of that kind of binary/source hybrid packaging concept but based on Gentoo's ebuild tree, Portage/Paludis package management, and the rest of the Gentoo platform.

Gentoo does do this, to some degree. Some of the bigger packages (such as openoffice, thunderbird and firefox) have -bin packages you can emerge, which are prebuilt binaries. The # of binary packages in there aren't that high, but the concept does exist.